Found The World's Rarest G-Shock, And A Conversation With G-Shock Inventor Kikuo Ibe

Mr. Kikuo Ibe never expected to be world famous, but famous he is: he's the man who invented the Casio G-Shock. At first, he hardly seems like the sort of person who could develop the world's toughest watch. He's slightly built, slim, soft-spoken, and bespectacled, which seems a little incongruous until you remember that G-Shock is as much an engineering achievement as a horological one, and Mr. Ibe is very much an engineer.

Mr. Kikuo Ibe never expected to be world famous, but famous he is: he's the man who invented the Casio G-Shock. At first, he hardly seems like the sort of person who could develop the world's toughest watch. He's slightly built, slim, soft-spoken, and bespectacled, which seems a little incongruous until you remember that G-Shock is as much an engineering achievement as a horological one, and Mr. Ibe is very much an engineer.

The history of the G-Shock is full of interesting stories (as you'd expect of a family of watches designed to tolerate just about any sort of abuse imaginable) and in a recent conversation with Ibe, at Casio's offices in New York, I had a chance to dig back a bit into those stories and to find out what's apocryphal, what's legend, and what's true. Many of the highlights in the story of G-Shock are familiar to hardcore G-Shock fans (and yes, there is a worldwide community of G-Shock collectors as serious about their watches as any gaggle of vintage Patek or Rolex collectors), but hearing them from the man who started it all over 30 years ago is a reminder of how much persistence it took to bring G-Shock to life.

Kikuo Ibe, the inventor of the G-Shock watch.

First of all, yes, it's absolutely true that Ibe got the idea for G-Shock after a beloved mechanical watch broke. The watch was a gift from his father, and one day, while walking down the street (he'd been with Casio for several years already when the accident happened) another pedestrian bumped into him hard enough to break the band of his watch and knock it to the pavement (Ibe says he tried to catch it, but missed). The watch broke in pretty much every way a watch can break: the hands were dislodged, the caseback came off, and the band broke. What Ibe won't tell, however, is what brand and model watch it was. He says he's been asked many times, but prefers not to say, beyond acknowledging that it was mechanical, a Japanese-made domestic model, and not a Casio.

Ibe began working on prototypes for a shock-proof watch in 1981. At the time, he says, the main goal in quartz watchmaking was to make very thin watches, so he started by trying to make housings for LCD quartz movements that would allow them to tolerate severe impacts. In 1982 he'd made enough progress for the development of G-Shock to become an official Casio project, with eight engineers assigned. The initial prototypes were proof-of-concept models and not especially wearable.

This early G-Shock prototype is more softball than wristwatch.

The testing process didn't really get off the ground until Ibe, seeing a girl bouncing a ball in a playground, got the idea of putting the movement inside a resilient structure that would isolate it from shocks. It's also absolutely true that the prototypes were tested by being thrown out of an upper floor bathroom window at Casio's research and development center: specifically, the third floor men's room window. The distance to the pavement below was ten meters, and Ibe's goal was to make a watch capable of surviving a ten meter fall, with a ten year battery life, and ten bar (100 meter) water resistance. The very first G-Shock model, DW-5000, came out in 1983, with 200m water resistance and, needless to say, the ability to survive a ten meter fall. Ibe says he tested the production prototypes in every way he could think of, including running them over with a car.

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"Project Team Tough" G-Shock, the rarest G-Shock of them all.

The "Project Team Tough" G-Shock's steel screw-down caseback.

The G-Shock you see here is one of the rarest in the world: the "Project Team Tough" G-Shock. These were given to the original eight-man development team and are identical to production models, except for the inclusion of the words "Project Team Tough" on the dial. Though eight were made in 1983, only two survive today. Ibe also says that, much to his regret, he didn't save any of the over 200 prototypes and that if he'd known how successful G-Shock was going to be, he'd never have thrown them out.

Two prototype metal G-Shocks, along with the first production model.

Other than the development of the original model, Ibe says that one of the biggest, if not the biggest, challenge his development team ever faced was creating a G-Shock with a metal case that would still have the same tough qualities as the earlier models. The idea in doing so was to create a G-Shock that could be worn on more formal occasions. The development process taxed his engineering team so much that to motivate them, he eventually "told them a little white lie" and promised that they were sure to be interviewed by a major magazine if they succeeded. As you can see from the development prototypes above the physical testing process was rather more brutal than not. One of the more significant challenges was figuring out how to secure the caseback against shock; in the urethane models the semi-rigid urethane strap actually acts as a shock absorber. In the metal model, the bracelet links were engineered so as to ensure they would fold inward, allowing the metal bracelet to absorb impact as well. The team eventually succeeded and on the right above, you can see the very first metal-cased G-Shock MRG-100, which was the first G-Shock to successfully dispense with the urethane outer shell of previous models.

The Casio G Shock "Hammer Tone."

Today, the most aesthetically complex G-Shock is the MRGG1000HT "Hammer Tone." At $6,200, it's also the most expensive G-Shock ever made, although the amount of manual craft that goes into it is also pretty off-the-charts (certainly, by G-Shock standards). The bezel and bracelet center links are decorated with the hammering technique known as tsuiki, but what's been less widely reported is that all the tsuiki decoration on all 300 models was done by one craftsman, Bihou Asano of Kyoto, who took half a year to complete the whole series.

Thirty-three years of G-Shock history on one table.

So what would Kikuo Ibe like to do next? A pet project of his is developing a G-Shock capable of being used for spacewalks. G-Shocks have of course been used inside spacecraft by astronauts and mission crew, but the big challenge, says Ibe, isn't radiation or magnetic fields: it's making a G-Shock that can tolerate the temperature swings found outside a spacecraft, which, according to NASA, can range from -250 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. (For reference, the original qualifying tests to which the Speedmaster was subjected by NASA included a high temperature test, of 48 hours at 160 °F (71 °C) followed by 30 minutes at 200 °F (93 °C), plus a low temperature test of four hours at 0 °F (−18 °C).

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Kikuo Ibe's personal G-Shock.

Interestingly enough, after 33 years, Ibe's personal favorite G-Shock model remains the original DW-5000, and those modern models which haven't departed too much from the original design. There is a blunt purity of purpose to the G-Shock that's unlike anything else in horology, and Ibe says that though the G-Shock has certainly become much more of a pop-culture icon than he'd ever dreamed possible (the MRG-100 team actually did get their big magazine interview, by the way, and the G-Shock has been in and out of the media spotlight countless times ever since) he feels that without the basic ability to stand up to anything you can throw at it that doesn't actually kill you, as well as a lot of things that actually might, the G-Shock would never have become what it is today.